Poor African Americans Research Articles

Abstract HUP14: Impact Of Socioeconomic Status And Race On The Access To Specialized Care And Enrollment/adherence In Clinical Trial In Cerebral Cavernous Malformations

Background: Cerebral cavernous malformation is a common lesion affecting more than a million Americans, with potential severe sequelae. It is unclear how socioeconomic status (SES) and race influence access to specialized care, and the enrollment and adherence in clinical trials aimed at novel therapies for CCM. Methods: We analyzed a cohort of patients harboring CCM lesions screened for IRB approved research studies between 01/2010 -12/2021 at an accredited center of excellence for CCM, leading NIH funded clinical studies. Demographics, lesion location, history of hemorrhage, insurance type and area of deprivation index (ADI) were collected. Insurance type was categorized as commercial, Medicare/Medicaid, or out-of-pocket. The ADI ranking score was analyzed per decile with 1 (least disadvantaged) through 10 (most disadvantaged). Primary outcomes were clinical follow-up within a year from the 1 st visit for all CCM patients (excluding pregnancy), and enrollment/adherence among eligible subjects for first in disease NIH funded clinical trial [clinicaltrials.gov NCT02603328]. Statistical analysis (Chi 2 test; t-test) was applied to determine whether these differed in ADI groups, races or insurance type categories. Results: Despite the institution’s location in an area with majority African American population and lower SES, only 11.5% of subjects were African American, and the majority (52.8%) had a high SES (ADI 1-3). As expected, patients who had a symptomatic bleed were more likely to follow-up (p=0.01), and those with brainstem lesion were more likely to enroll and adhere in clinical trial (p=0.02). Correcting for these confounders, there was no difference in rates of clinical follow-up or enrollment/adherence among different ADI groups, races or insurance coverage. Conclusion: Access of disadvantaged patients and races to a center of excellence care and research remains limited despite geographic proximity to their community. Contrary to common belief, patients with poor SES and African Americans are as likely to follow-up and enroll/adhere in clinical trials, if provided access to specialized care. Mitigation efforts should target systemic causes of low access to specialized care among poor and African American patients.

Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People

Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People

“This Is What's Real”: The Pathology of Black Addiction in the Hood Films of the 1990s

“This Is What's Real”: The Pathology of Black Addiction in the Hood Films of the 1990s

Tornadoes, poverty and race in the USA: A five-decade analysis

PurposeThe study aims to analyze the roles of poverty and African American status in terms of vulnerability to tornado damages and barriers to recovery afterward.Design/methodology/approachUsing five decades of county-level data on tornadoes, the authors test whether economic damages from tornadoes are correlated with vulnerability (proxied by poverty and African American status) and wealth (proxied by median income and educational attainment), controlling for tornado risk. A multinomial logistic difference-in-difference (DID) estimator is used to analyze long-run effects of tornadoes in terms of displacement (reduced proportions of the poor and African Americans), abandonment (increased proportions of those groups) and neither or both.FindingsControlling for tornado risk, poverty and African American status are linked to greater tornado damages, as is wealth. Absent tornadoes, displacement and abandonment are both more likely to occur in urban settings and communities with high levels of vulnerability, while abandonment is more likely to occur in wealthy communities, consistent with on-going forces of segregation. Tornado damages significantly increase abandonment in vulnerable communities, thereby increasing the prevalence of poor African Americans in those communities. Therefore, the authors conclude that tornadoes contribute to on-going processes generating inequality by poverty/race.Originality/valueThe current paper is the first study connecting tornado damages to race and poverty. It is also the first study finding that tornadoes contribute to long-term processes of segregation and inequality.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

Communities Bring Hope to a Desperate, Divided, and Pain-Riddled America

America is increasingly divided in terms of income, health, and hope for the future. The most stark marker of this is our rising rates of mortality, driven by "deaths of despair" among less than college educated middle-aged whites. The patterns in death closely match those we find in lack of hope, stress, and worry among the same cohorts and in the same places. That stands in contrast to the much higher levels of optimism among poor African Americans and Hispanics. This article highlights the ways in which the communities surrounding the latter cohorts are the roots of resilience and how they may provide lessons for the difficult task of restoring hope in populations and places where it has been lost.

Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction by David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski

Reviewed by: Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstructionby David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski Angie Maxwell Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction. By David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski. Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives. ( Princeton and Oxford, Eng.: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 468. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-12649-4.) Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstructionprovides scholars of the U.S. South with something they rarely have and desperately need: a quantitative political history. The book's historical narrative provides a nuanced chronology that the authors have meticulously crafted, and the quantitative analysis offers a broad view of the real impact of their subject over time. In this case, the subject is the southern members of the U.S. Congress in the six decades after Reconstruction. The authors make a strong argument for why the region deserves such attention and why the reestablishment of white rule in the Jim Crow South had such a major impact on the national body politic. As authors David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski note in chapter 1, V. O. Key Jr. undertook his landmark study Southern Politics in State and Nation(New York, 1949) to explain the political behavior of the region to the nation at large. Southern Nationtraces the repercussions of that political behavior for the rest of the country in two critical periods: the post-Reconstruction reestablishment of southern white power and what the authors describe as "the high moment of Jim Crow when the white South came to be the dominant force in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party conceded southern autonomy" (p. 17). In doing so, the authors manage to complicate popular understandings of a solid, conservative white South. For example, in their analysis the authors highlight how southern support in Congress proved vital to the passage of several Progressive policies in the early twentieth century. Though elites, desperate to prevent an alliance of poor white people and African Americans, often found ways to squash Populist uprisings internally in the South, they supported some Populist policies at the federal level. They could do so, and could even cross party lines on some issues nationally, because they maintained such power in the South's one-party politics. Incumbency was often guaranteed, which gave some white southern congressmen more flexibility than those facing tough reelections. However, such flexibility could not coexist with any sense of threat to the southern racial hierarchy. In those moments when national legislation endangered white supremacy, southern congressional delegations [End Page 714]were a united, defensive front. That front proved highly effective at obstructing federal efforts—direct or indirect—to level any aspect of the racial playing field. To this end, southern white congressmen wielded enormous power. On nonracial issues, their incumbency advantage allowed them to be swing votes, but on any legislation affecting race relations, they were a block of massive resistance. They weighed their hope for federal improvements in the region against their fear of too much federal interference, all the while balancing their "constellation of commitments" to white authority, to populism in a general sense, and "to constituency needs in a poor region" (p. 384). Nonsouthern congressmen, in turn, had to sidestep any legislative land mines that would spark the southern defensive block, while simultaneously courting the swing or crossover votes of southern congressmen. The authors make the important point that, rather than being aberrant, southern congressional political behavior bent national politics to its will. It was the central force to which federal legislative agendas had to react and be shaped accordingly. This conclusion indicates, the authors note, "the need to modify theories of congressional lawmaking to account for the exceptional features of southern representation in national politics" (p. 41). The data presented in Southern Nationshould influence the historiography as well. The authors quantify and then dissect the political solid South narrative, highlighting each little crack and repair, and showing how the region "played a key role in developing the content and contours of American liberalism" (p. 384). Angie Maxwell University of Arkansas Copyright © 2019 The Southern...

Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South by John Hayes

Reviewed by: Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South by John Hayes Paul Yandle Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South. By John Hayes. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. x, 238.) John Hayes’s highly readable work takes the reader below the surface of “respectable” middle-class religion in emerging New South towns to view what he argues was a set of faith practices common to poor African Americans as well as whites. As he tries to traces the evidences of Christianity as it was practiced on the fringes of a region in transition, he chides nineteenth and twentieth observers for dismissing the religious practices of poor blacks and whites as escapist, insisting that practitioners of folk religion were quite focused on the world in which they lived. “Perhaps ironically, the New South furnished the material basis for such an interracial alliance by fostering a modern poverty of landlessness and low wages that touched millions of whites and blacks,” Hayes concludes near the end of Hard, Hard Religion (195). The point is a running theme throughout the book. In an instructive introduction and first chapter, Hayes builds a picture of the conditions that, he argues, were the germinal ground for a set of faith practices and a worldview that reflected the marginalization of those caught on the bottom rung of industrial transition. As the post–Reconstruction South, including portions of Appalachia, moved toward manufacturing and extraction industries that pulled the region into larger markets, Protestant denominations—in particular Baptists and Methodists—began to emphasize what Hayes refers to as an “ethos of respectability and domesticity” that reflected a growing middle class (31–32). With the growth of towns, a class-based segregation began to emerge along with race-based Jim Crow, and in the process middle-class African American and white southerners began to denigrate their poorer, rural counterparts mired in debt and tenancy as lazy or irreligious. Hayes argues that the insults were groundless, pointing out that rural areas had networks of lay preachers who supported themselves as farmers or laborers in addition to preaching to rural congregations. These groups of people spread hymns, songs, and other practices across wide swaths of geography as well as between ethnicities. Following the first chapter are four chapters covering a series of topical themes. Chapters two and three deal at the micro level with rural southerners and their treatments of mortality, Christian conversion, and God’s call to preach, in one portion examining in detail variations on a song about death [End Page 114] most likely transmitted by traveling preachers and peripatetic workers as they found various means of income in different locations. Examining similarities between songs about death and medieval Danse Macabre, Hayes concludes that unlike middle-class evangelicals whose faith was becoming increasingly articulated in domestic terms, poorer southerners, whose lives were often marginalized, focused on death as a reminder that life was fragile and precious as they saw themselves as living in a liminal space between the transcendent and the mundane. A fourth chapter, titled “Sacramental Expressions,” builds on the difference even further; as middle-class evangelicals focused on the home as a sanctuary, poorer Christians saw the sacred throughout their landscape, as evidenced by the practices of grave decoration and river baptism away from houses of worship. Chapter five, titled “The Ethics of Neighborliness,” explores how poorer Christians, white and African American, valued hospitality and community as a means of meaningful survival. Immanence is one of the running themes of the book, as Hayes observes that the sacred was never distant from the daily worlds of people for whom survival was a constant struggle (113). Hayes’s concentration on the spiritual opens up another avenue for the study of faith expressions examined by other historians in more temporal contexts; for example, in chapter four, Hayes touches upon the use of clocks to adorn graves, a practice examined in Mark Smith’s seminal work Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, 1997). Hayes’s expansion beyond class analysis does not mean that he abandons class or race as a lens through which one can...

Flint Goodridge Hospital and Black Health Care in Twentieth-Century New Orleans

Flint Goodridge Hospital and Black Health Care in Twentieth-Century New Orleans

Interactions between race/ethnicity, poverty status, and pregnancy cardio-metabolic diseases in prediction of postpartum cardio-metabolic health

ABSTRACT Background: Prenatal health disparities exist for African Americans and low socioeconomic status (SES) individuals when compared to non-Hispanic Whites and people of higher SES, particularly in cardio-metabolic diseases. Furthermore, having had a pregnancy-specific cardio-metabolic disease, e.g. preeclampsia, increases risk for future cardio-metabolic disease. Although these factors (race, SES and pregnancy cardio-metabolic disease) are interrelated, studies have rarely considered their combined effect on postpartum cardio-metabolic risk. The purpose of this study was to assess whether SES, race/ethnicity, and prenatal cardio-metabolic disease interact in the prediction of postpartum cardio-metabolic risk. Methods: A sample of 1,753 low-income women of African American, Latina, non-Hispanic White race/ethnicity was recruited after a birth in 5 US sites. Household income was used to categorize poverty status as Poor (< Federal Poverty Level; FPL), near poor (100–200% FPL), or low/middle income (> 200% FPL). Three prenatal cardio-metabolic disease diagnoses (preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, gestational diabetes) were identified from medical records. Four biomarkers (mean arterial pressure, glycosylated haemoglobin, total cholesterol:HDL ratio, and waist-hip ratio) were collected at 6 and 12 months postpartum, and combined into an average postpartum cardio-metabolic risk index. Maternal age, pre-pregnancy body mass index, parity, health behaviors and employment status were covariates. Results: Analyses revealed interactions of race/ethnicity, poverty status, and prenatal cardio-metabolic diseases in the prediction of postpartum cardio-metabolic risk. African American women had higher postpartum cardio-metabolic risk, which was exacerbated following a prenatal cardio-metabolic disease. Low/middle income African American women had higher cardio-metabolic risk compared to poor African American, and all Latina and White women. Conclusions: African American women, and especially those who experienced pregnancy complications, emerged as vulnerable, and greater household income did not appear to confer protection against worse postpartum cardio-metabolic risk for this group. These results highlight the complex interplay between socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity with respect to understanding health disparities.

Historical Disaster and the New Urban Crisis

Conventional studies of urban poverty largely blame African Americans for their impoverished situation and the consequent social difficulties that arise there from. This paper confronts and indicts that perspective. Examining the historic dehumanization process that shaped African America, the present study argues that it served as the framework for how whites justified their racist and violent treatment of slaves and their African American descendants. It was this same racist theory and practice that led to the construction of racialized oppressive urban ghettos that became the economically impoverished domicile for urban black people. Therefore, poor African Americans have been caught in a cauldron of circumstances not of their own making, but with which they have had to cope and struggle.

Laura E. Free. Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era.

In Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era, Laura E. Free seeks to answer two central questions: Why was the word “male” used in the Fourteenth Amendment, and why did some key woman suffrage activists embrace race, rather than gender, as a political tool? In addressing these questions, she examined six decades of debates on voting rights that took place in various public forums during the Civil War era, including in constitutional conventions, in state legislatures, in Congress, and in activists’ public conventions and meetings. The result is a comprehensive study of the political decision-making process. We like to think that our nation was founded on principles of democracy. And indeed, the U.S. Constitution, written in 1787, begins with a declaration of inclusiveness: “We, the people of the United States.” But, as Free notes, despite this inclusive language, virtually the only people who were eligible to vote were white male property owners over the age of twenty-one years. Poor men, women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other ethnic groups were excluded from the franchise and the governmental process.

Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era by Laura E. Free

Reviewed by: Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era by Laura E. Free Jerrad P. Pacatte Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era. By Laura E. Free. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015, 235 pages, $39.95 Cloth. Historian Laura Free's monograph Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era explores an often overlooked chapter in nineteenth-century United States history: why, in the aftermath of the Civil War, did the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intentionally use the word "male" to articulate the ideal citizen-voter? Beyond contextualizing the gender politics at play in this "unprecedented moment in American constitutional history," effectively excluding women of all races from the vote, Suffrage Reconstructed delves into the writings and speeches of key white female suffragists, many of whom hailed from the Empire State and whose antebellum and post-Civil War agitation helped reshape the political landscape of New York State (5). In the process, Free insightfully unpacks these women's complicated relationships along lines of race and class, exposing how their racial prejudices informed and undergirded their crusades for suffrage in post-Civil War era America. Free identifies the various ways Americans reconstructed—and in the case of women and African Americans, constructed—their access to the ballot box. Wedding American political thought, African American history, and women's suffrage, the book unpacks the ideological underpinnings of the oft-cited [End Page 506] phrase "We the people," a phrase predicated upon suffrage, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Suffrage Reconstructed chronicles the ways the American nation fashioned and refashioned its definition of the ideal citizen-voter from the time of the writing of the Constitution. When the founders signed the Constitution in 1787, virtually no gender pronouns were to be found in the document. In the Early Republic, the words "citizen and voter" were synonymous with white, landowning males over the age of twenty-one. Yet Free reminds her readers that the antebellum system of property-based voting rights was not without its own Achilles heel, particularly in the case of free African American men and landowning women whose presence challenged the hegemony of white male patriarchy north and south. Drawing from New York state convention records, Free describes how in 1821 the Empire State instituted the requirement that male African Americans had to own at least $250 worth of property in order to cast votes. She documents several instances whereby black male New Yorkers satisfied these property requirements, and in turn, voted; all others, i.e., the poor, the landless, free and enslaved African Americans, Native peoples, and women were barred from the franchise. The 1830s and 1840s witnessed the emergence of social and political movements spearheaded by African American women and men and white women in the North to both expand the franchise and abolish the "peculiar institution" of slavery. As the abolitionist fervor gained traction across the Northeast in the early 1830s, several northern states responded to these calls for the enfranchisement of the North's black male citizenry by doubling down on their state's suffrage restrictions. Free revisits the 1846 New York State Constitutional Convention, a meeting where state delegates ultimately rejected a provision to extend equal voting rights to African American men, to prove her point. Citing convention transcripts held in the Empire State, as well as other federal and state documents, Free persuasively argues that African American men justified their enfranchisement because of their gender, whereas white suffragists initially pointed to abstract principles of democracy enshrined in the Constitution (156–61). Although divided by race and gender, white suffragists and African American men shared identical goals: the right to vote and the full recognition of their citizenship. [End Page 507] Free shows that the supposed gender neutrality of the federal Constitution persisted until 1866. Faced with the pressing issues of African American citizenship and congressional representation following the Civil War, white male politicians serving in the Reconstruction-era United States Congress opted to enfranchise all male citizens of the nation. Consequently, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thereby incorporated the word "male" three times in the amendment's second section. Free...

Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity by Stanley I. Thangaraj

Reviewed by: Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity by Stanley I. Thangaraj Harjant S. Gill Stanley I. Thangaraj, Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 288 pp. Based on over four years of research among the South Asian Basketball leagues in Atlanta, Stanley Thangaraj’s Desi Hoop Dreams is an insightful exploration into the processes of identity formation for young South Asian men growing up in suburban America. Basketball, and practices related to the sport, serves as a crucial site for gender development for the second generation South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi) men. Their on- and off-court performances are motivated by the desire to repudiate being stereotyped as tepid and nerdy by demonstrating their physical prowess and athletic abilities, a practice Thangaraj refers to as “manning up,” as they attempt to “fashion their own version of American masculinity” (5). In Chapter 1, Thangaraj introduces us to core members of the Atlanta Outkasts, a cohort of young South Asian men, mostly Muslim, who met playing basketball in local mosques and community centers, and are now part of Atlanta’s diverse pick-up basketball circuit. These players do not all fit seamlessly into the middle class, professional immigrants who have lived in Atlanta since 1960s and that make up the more visible diasporic community celebrated for its achievements as the respectable “model minority” (40). Yet they are confronted with the gendered stereotypes associated with Asian immigrants, including being portrayed as effeminate in popular culture for their passive obedience to the status quo and often aspiring to be just like their white counterparts (63). Instead, South Asian men most active in Atlanta’s basketball circuits belong to working class families, many of whom arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, and are still [End Page 957] striving to achieve the elusive middle class status. Basketball courts serve as space where young South Asian men simultaneously work through their feelings of inadequacy as sons of recent immigrants and their frustrations with their racialization within the popular American cultural imagination that often stereotypes them as spelling bee champions or terrorists (42). In a style reminiscent of Mira Nair’s seminal film Mississippi Masala (1991) that subverts popular conceptions of race and nationhood, Chapters 2 and 3 complicate conventional notions of race and belonging by exploring the relationships and dynamics at play when brown and black bodies occupy the same court. Thangaraj notes that South Asian players claim American-ness by “embodying black stylistics” and consuming African American cultural forms like basketball, hip-hop, and rap music (38–39). In doing so, they challenge societal expectations for South Asians to follow “a linear progression to whiteness” (63). While their on-court performance serves as a source of empowerment in resisting stereotypes, the players often stop short of reaching a broader understanding of racial dynamics at play in everyday life in the American South (39). Instead, players recast the basketball court as an exclusively South Asian space by excluding African American players from their teams and restricting their access to the court (63, 106). These chapters paint a complex picture of how the court serves as a microcosm for broader racial dynamics playing out between different working class communities who access public sporting arenas and other recreational spaces in Atlanta (54–57). Thangaraj notes that while African American players practice exclusion of South Asians by not picking them for their teams, South Asian players practice exclusion by using capital and social networks to “privatize” public gyms, blocking access to those who cannot afford to pay the reservation fees (54–57). In this sense, middle and working class South Asian communities in Atlanta are often “complicit in the displacement of (poor and working class) African Americans” (47). Ironically, while the South Asian players seem largely indifferent to African American and other communities’ histories and experiences of similar oppression, they evoke their own histories of marginalization by referencing ethnic and caste-based identities in their team names, using terms such as “Outkasts” and “Untouchables” (87). Drawing liberally on South Asian cultural forms, they deploy Hindi and Urdu epithets like “Kallu...

Chicago goes global: redevelopment, culture, and fear

Chicago's remarkably flexible growth machine, like their brethren across Rust Belt America, continues to aggressively press forward to build an internationally competitive city. This paper deepens our understanding of Chicago's recently changed growth machine. It focuses on its current redevelopment narrative as it is used on the South Side and chronicles two new features about it: its revamped use of fear and its re-fashioned notion of culture. I flesh out these two elements as they circulate through a now dominant redevelopment program: historic preservation. I chronicle three points in this paper. First, programs like historic preservation, like so many current city programs, have now fully shifted to being a neoliberal economic development tool to promote the “go-global Chicago” project. Second, two dominant fears recently nuanced anchor the narrative: fear of a city-destroying globalization and fear of city-subverting poor African-Americans. Third, a revamped notion of culture is used that helps provide resonance and dark appeal to the two offered fears. The culture notion is put into play as two dominant things, as the idealized and timeless glue that unifies Chicago's mainstream and as problematic values and meanings carried by black bodies which renders them civic tainting “ocular trash”.

What’s Wrong with the Poor? Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty by Mical Raz (review)

Reviewed by: What’s Wrong with the Poor? Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty by Mical Raz Dennis A. Doyle Mical Raz. What’s Wrong with the Poor? Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty. Studies in Social Medicine Series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xiii + 242 pp. Ill. $39.95 (978-1-4696-0887-7). Within U.S. history of medicine, outstanding works on race and health have been coming out at a breakneck pace. Historian and physician Mical Raz’s What’s Wrong with the Poor? makes a substantial contribution to that literature. Raz examines how mental health theory helped frame urban social and educational policy during the Great Society. What she finds is that an overwhelming number of liberal policy milestones and debates in the 1960s—from Project Head Start to the infamous Moynihan Report and the Kerner Commission—were inspired by cultural deprivation theory. Through the lens of this theory, liberal mental health experts, pundits, and policy makers medicalized poverty, analyzed its psychological impact on working-poor Americans, and then proposed ways to wage war against poverty without necessarily striking at its structural roots. One of this book’s many strengths is its recognition that the war on poverty was really a war on what well-meaning liberals imagined poverty had done to the inner lives of the poor. For many of these thinkers, it was not the continued existence of systematic injustices or structural inequalities that made poverty in midst of postwar prosperity so troubling. Rather, poverty was worth fighting because it failed to provide children with everything normal human development required. For some liberals, postwar America had been so prosperous partially because middle-class, nuclear families with stay-at-home moms facilitated maturation better than any other environment. These experts expected that low-income Americans—especially African Americans in central cities—lived in conditions that did not adequately stimulate their full cognitive potential. Activists and policy makers then reasoned that the urban poor—reframed as the “culturally deprived”—could not be expected to compete in mainstream American life without some compensatory program providing the stimuli their homes supposedly lacked. Raz does an excellent job narrating where this theory came from and how it came to exert so much influence on social policy targeting poor African Americans in the 1960s. In the first two chapters, she demonstrates that cultural deprivation theory was not the product of experiments or hard scientific evidence. Rather it originated as a form of reasoning by analogy. Cultural deprivation’s analogues were studies of sensory, maternal, and nutritional deprivation performed in the 1940s and 1950s. Without performing their own studies, social scientists, psychiatrists, and politicians reasoned that the culture of a “slum family” would cognitively impair someone the way a sensory deprivation tank, the absence of motherly hugs, or severe niacin deficiency did. The scientific validity of sensory deprivation studies, combined with the American public’s low opinion of inner-city black life, helped lend credence to this false equivalency that was cultural deprivation theory. As a sort of common sense for liberal policy makers, the theory provided an easy justification for government interventions in the lives of the black poor. For instance, 1965’s Project Head Start was originally intended to provide poor children with the intellectual and verbal stimulation that their homes allegedly lacked. [End Page 363] This work also presents a nuanced analysis of the relationship between race and cultural deprivation theory. Ostensibly, this theory was supposed to be race-neutral. However older assumptions about race certainly mediated how cultural deprivation theory was applied to African American life. As Raz shows, arguments made in support of day care and special education for poor black children often reinforced negative racial stereotypes, albeit pinning the blame for their alleged mental and behavioral shortcomings on bad mothers rather than biology. Yet while it appears that cultural deprivation discourse tended to demonize working families, Raz was also refreshingly attentive to moments where it did not merely “blame the victims.” For example, the fifth chapter finds that Kerner Commission’s researchers argued that racism and other structural forces were actually responsible for the cultural deprivations that triggered the urban...

Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts 1700–1830 by Kelly A. Ryan (review)

Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts 1700-1830. By Kelly A. Ryan. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 288. Cloth, $55.00.)Reviewed by Kara M. FrenchIn Regulating Passion, Kelly A. Ryan has expertly crafted a history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Massachusetts that is fully intersectional in its understanding of how hierarchies of gender, race, class, and age created an enduring system of white male dominance. Her work deftly builds upon the arguments made by women of color feminists such as Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, who have long championed that identity and oppression are intersectional, and reinforces the idea that gender as a category of analysis cannot be understood in isolation. Ryan argues that sexuality and patriarchy are inextricably linked because Governmental, social, and private authority over Indians and African Americans derived from the power that fathers and husbands had over wives and children (59). Regulating Passion also demonstrates that patriarchal control was not a casualty of the War of Independence. Rather it transformed and evolved, the direct of the colonial era replaced by a new standard of sexual reputation promoted by the moral reformers and print literature of the early republic (4-5).The American Revolution is the hinge on which Ryan's analysis of sexuality and patriarchy swings. The first half of the book focuses on how elite white men used their status as patriarchs to control the sexuality of white women, poor white men, African Americans, and Native Americans through the legal system, while simultaneously ensuring that their own indiscretions remained shielded from public scrutiny. The statistical evidence Ryan has assembled from court records is very persuasive, and her analysis of the legal system's regulation of white women's sexuality is a highlight of the book. The court records plainly show that by 1760, only women were facing criminal prosecution for unmarried sex in Massachusetts. Unwed fathers were not, however, subject to the same fines or physical punishments as unwed mothers in the late colonial period. What is striking is that the courts continued to punish white women for fornication even in cases where they married the child's father or suffered a miscarriage. As Ryan notes, the court's interest in such cases had little to do with the maintenance of the child and a great deal more to do with punishing white women for activity outside of marriage.Even more telling is that magistrates did not prosecute Native American women and enslaved women for fornication with the same regularity as they did white women. Such prosecutions would have brought the indiscretions of elite white men with slaves and servants out of the shadows and into the public eye. The courts only seemed to take an interest in cases of infanticide, when the loss of an enslaved woman's child would have resulted in a loss of property for her master. Enslaved men were similarly not prosecuted for interracial liaisons with white women because compelling an enslaved man to support a child would have given enslaved men a right to patriarchy that undermined the slave system.Regulating Passion is also innovative for noting the ways in which white men's and women's participation in the American Revolution was not only gendered but highly sexualized. …

Introduction

100 The Michigan Historical Review Andrew R. Highsmith. Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 376. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $45.00. The title of Andrew Highsmith’s book is a quote from a placard outside the razed site of the General Motors Buick City plant in Flint, Michigan: Demolition Means Progress (p. 266). The subject of the book, however, reaches far beyond the Vehicle City’s post-1970s deindustrialization. Highsmith traces the long history of metropolitan Flint and its “ceaseless quest for revitalization” to argue that “progress” has been associated with large-scale clearance and reinvention from the early twentieth century to today (p. 20). But even the best-intentioned urban renewal policies, his research makes clear, instead hardened social and economic inequalities as Flint became a poster-city for Rust Belt decay. While individual threads of Highsmith’s interlocking narratives of suburbanization, racial segregation, and deindustrialization seem at first blush familiar to urban historians, this work is notable for its comprehensive, metropolitan approach and for adding a small-city case study to the literature on urban renewal and decline. With chronological chapters focusing on Flint’s housing and education policies, workplace discrimination, industrial decentralization, and slum clearance, Highsmith provides a fine-grained analysis of how economic and racial inequality in American cities is spatialized and planned from the federal to municipal levels. He adds the useful concept of “administrative segregation” to the customary de jure/de facto binary as he details the processes by which officials drew school district boundaries around racial enclaves, suburbs incorporated to protect property values, and developers maximized government subsidies by building substandard housing. Highsmith convincingly demonstrates that it was the implementation of policies as much as the letter of the law or individual choice that led to widespread urban inequality. In foregrounding the uneven effects of pro-growth renewal, Highsmith rejects the simplified declension narrative that corporate abandonment and white flight drove urban decline. Instead, he pivots the book around General Motors’ failed push for a “New Flint” metropolitan government in the late 1950s, insisting that the corporation maintained ties to Flint even after relocating its plants to the urban fringes. Rather than reify the image of the homogenous and upwardly mobile postwar suburb, Highsmith reveals little-discussed policies of “suburban redlining” in working-class white neighborhoods and federally backed Book Reviews 101 “Section 235” predatory lending practices that preceded the most recent housing crisis by four decades. With his long view, Highsmith shows that citizen demands for civil rights, such as open housing and school desegregation, have been time and again overshadowed by economic development agendas. Despite his concluding optimism for an alternative future, the cumulative weight of Highsmith’s research leaves a deep and durable imprint of spatially embedded inequality on Flint’s poor and working-class African Americans. As such, Demolition Means Progress offers a case study that puts national metropolitan trends in the twentieth century into sharp relief. Readers with an interest in the racial and economic histories and transformations of Flint and the industrial North will find it of particular value. Chloe Taft Yale University Holly M. Karibo. Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the DetroitWindsor Borderland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 226. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper: $29.95. Holly Karibo’s Sin City North explores the role of cross-border prostitution and heroin-trafficking in shaping the communities and local economies of the postwar Detroit-Windsor borderland. She posits that the rise of crime and vice exposed the “contradictory nature of the border” as it made both travel and trade easier while also attempting to filter out illegal or unwanted products and people (p. 3). Karibo argues the study of vice provides insight into the ways in which men and women defined citizenship and determined belonging within the social space of the national border (p. 156). The relative economic success and rising interest in leisure tourism following the war aided the boom in illicit economies, and Karibo reads participation in vice economy as an alternative and viable path to a consumer-based identity in the era of postwar...

President of the Other America: Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty by Edward R. Schmitt (review)

PRESIDENT OF THE OTHER AMERICA: Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty. By Edward R. Schmitt. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2010.Snapshots of the 1960s fill many pages of the scrapbook of the American century. These images display the heroism of the unknown masses as well as the achievements of the Great Men of the Moment. The few pictures here that capture the relationship between the giants on the mountaintop and the masses that fought injustice from the bottom-up depict scenes of a middle-aged white man in shirtsleeves, a thick mop of hair covering one eye, being pulled by throngs of young people of color. These are portraits of Robert F. Kennedy and the thousands of poor Puerto Ricans, Latinos, Native Americans, and African Americans who were in the thick of the era's battle for American democracy and with whom he came to share common cause. Seeking to transcend the standard political biographies of Kennedy, Edward Schmitt's President of the America: Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty places this scene at the center of his story.In the mode of Thomas Jackson's treatment of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s social philosophy in From Civil Rights to Human Rights (2006), Schmitt's project here is to show us the genealogy of Kennedy's 1968 campaign as the poor peoples' presidential candidate. Relying upon a conventional variety of archival sources and grounded firmly in the political and policy histories of the War on Poverty, the book takes us from RFK's introduction to the Other America during his brother's campaign to win West Virginia in 1960 to his own adoption of the issue as a domestic policy priority during his senatorial campaign in 1964. A naif about the realities of life on the other side of the tracks, Kennedy at first made personal connections with civil rights leaders and human rights activists for political gain. The more he learned about the conditions of poverty on Indian reservations, among migrant workers, and in urban slums, however, the more incensed he became. Schmitt paints a portrait of a man of privilege to whom poverty had been invisible. And when the scales were removed from his eyes, he became a man who truly saw. Thus, unlike other generals in the poverty war, Kennedy's ideology was shaped by genuine outrage.Unlike Jackson's book, though, Schmitt's gives readers little substantive insight into RFK's journey through the thicket of ideas prevailing in midcentury social policy about poverty. …